USC ISI then won $3 million in
CRAFT FinFET contract options in
March 2016 — $1.2 million for phase

1, $890,524 for phase 2 option 1, and

$840,335 for phase 3 option 2.

To maintain technology dominance, the U.S. military is developing
next-generation systems that require
high computational performance
in a power-constrained environment. These technologies cannot be
manufactured fast enough, causing
systems designers today to choose
between high performance and low
power consumption. For the most
crucial applications, systems designers must choose between high-per-forming, custom ICs that require
years to design and fabricate, or settle for a 100X lower-performing, general-purpose processor that can be
programmed in months.

The DARPA CRAFT program seeks
to demonstrate a custom IC design
flow and methodology in a leading-edge commercial 16- or 14-nanome-
ter fab, port these designs to new
foundry process flows, and increase
design reuse by providing a repository for secure storage and distribution of design elements.

The CRAFT has three technical
goals: reducing custom IC design
and fab cycle time by 10X with new
software tools; enabling a 50 percent
reuse of critical military IC modules with an intellectual property
(IP) repository system; and enabling
flexible chip fabrication by porting a
technology node from one foundry
to another, or migrating from one
design node to another design node
at the same foundry.

To meet these goals, DARPAneeds to build custom ICs using theFinFET leading-edge CMOS processnode because of this technology’sdensity, performance, and poweradvantages. To access this tech-nology, the CRAFT program needsFinFET foundry access, and this iswhere USC Information SciencesInstitute comes in.

In the program’s first phase, USC
experts will have demonstrated a
10X reduction in design efforts using
a standard flow for a system-on-chip
(SoC) with logic block size of more
than 200,000 gates, several mixed
signal blocks, SRAM memory blocks,
and third-party intellectual property (IP) blocks. In the second phase,
USC experts will demonstrate a 7X
reduction in design efforts to create
a DARPA-selected SoC design, document the design flow; test fabricated
chip functionality across standard
temperature ranges; characterize
an initial suite of macros and generators; document a reference CAD
flow; and design a suite of macro
and generators.

USC is providing a design aggregation service for other CRAFT contractors as they perform dedicated and
foundry-driven FinFET multi-project
wafer shuttle runs. USC ISI will act
as the primary interface between
foundries and DARPA.

USC ISI will do the work in
Marina Del Rey, Calif., and should
be finished by August 2018.

FOR MORE INFORMATION visit the USCInformation Sciences Institute onlineat www.isi.edu.

AIRBORNE SENSORS

Army chooses airborne electro-opticalsensor payloads from L- 3 Wescam

Electro-optical sensors experts at L- 3

Communications will provide theU.S. Army with six Wescam MX-15Dsensor turrets for reconnaissanceand surveillance applications on heli-copters and fixed-wing aircraft.Officials of the Army ContractingCommand at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.,have announced a $7.4 million con-tract to the L- 3 Sonoma EO segmentin Santa Rosa, Calif., to provide theWescam MX-15D sensor turrets andsupport equipment.

and similar kinds of surveillance
missions. It supports as many as six
sensors simultaneously, including
visible-light cameras, infrared sensors, and laser rangefinders.

The MX- 15 has a zoom potter to
enable the operator to balance magnification and field of view between
moderately wide and ultra-narrow
imagery. The system’s high-resolution shortwave infrared (SWIR) camera provides imaging in haze and fog.

The MX- 15’s turret has a four-axis
gimbal with internal inertial measurement unit, image stabilization,
common operator interfaces and hand
controllers, and a map-based sensor
management package that enables
operators to control sensors from an
intuitive interface. In addition to helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, the
L- 3 MX- 15 electro-optical sensor pod
also is for unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) and aerostats. Í